


Is It Gremlins?

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Developing Friendship, Gen, Mild Spoilers, POV Female Character, Post-Star Wars: A New Hope, Slice of Life, Sort Of, The gremlins are really just an excuse for interaction, rebellion era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 09:51:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14734715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: This wasnothow Sabine expected to spend her afternoon.





	Is It Gremlins?

**Author's Note:**

> Written because there's a weirdly high number of parallels between their characters, and I would have liked to see them interact more in canon.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least, that was the thought going through Sabine’s mind as she checked the next perimeter sensor on her list. The perimeter sensors Rebel Command had sent them weren’t going to do so hot in Reamma’s weather, humid and stormy as it was, not without modifications. Typical. They were always having to siphon sand out of the sensors on Atollon, and now Sabine found herself weather-proofing another set of perimeter sensors.

 _At least there aren’t any krykna snapping at me this time._ She might feel a pang for Atollon from time to time, lost to them as so many other places were, but she didn’t miss Atollon’s apex predators. She’d rather deal with a rabid lothcat. Oh, sure, there was wildlife on Reamma, but the only creatures Sabine had encountered were timid and shy of humanoids. The only trace of them she’d seen were the large, reflective discs of their eyes peering out of the shadows at her.

If she was honest with herself, she was a bit curious to get a closer look at them. Push came to shove, these little critters, whatever they were, might have to serve as a food source for the Rebels stationed here. But right now, the sensors were more important than becoming acquainted with the local wildlife. She was so close to being done that she could almost taste completion; the fauna of Reamma could wait.

“…copy?” Static buzzed on Sabine’s commlink, eventually resolving itself into “Lieutenant commander Wren, do you copy?”

Sabine frowned as she tapped her commlink. _When’s the last time he contacted me for anything?_ “I’m here. What is it?”

“Your schedule says that you’re supposed to finish up with the perimeter sensors within the hour. Correct?”

Sabine bit back a groan. Sometimes, talking to Kallus was a little like talking to AP-5, and the tendency to be a stickler for deadlines was a trait she really wished neither of them possessed, let alone _shared_. Good thing AP-5 was with Hera on the _Ghost_. “Yeah, Kallus, I know. I’m moving as fast as I can here, but for a job like this, you can either have things done fast, or you can have them done right.” Of course, it would have been a lot easier to get things set up fast _and_ right if Rebel Command had sent more people to set this base up, but it really wasn’t worth belaboring a point they’d both brought up already. “You don’t want the sensors going dark the next time we have a storm.”

“That’s not it.”

The pause that followed was so heavy that Sabine couldn’t help but stare down at her commlink with some measure of concern. It was just the two of them in the area right now; the rest of the crew was on the _Ghost_ , doing another onceover of the planet to confirm that there was no Imperial presence on Reamma. “Hey, you still there?” she asked, a particular strain of anxiety the likes of which she hadn’t felt in years making her voice quake, just a little bit.

“What? Yes, I’m still here. How close are you to being done?”

Sabine examined the sensor she’d been working on before answering, “I’m on the last one now. I’ll be done in, I don’t know, ten, fifteen minutes? Depends on how it takes to the upgrade.” So long as it didn’t try to short out like some of the others, anyway. If that happened, it was gonna be a lot longer than fifteen minutes before Sabine could pack up and head back to base.

No, that wasn’t going to happen this time. _“I’m being optimistic!”_ The memory, though years old, still stung, but she tried now to take it as guidance for the future. She could do that much, at least. Most of the sensors had accepted the upgrade with no problems; out of all of them, she’d only had three that had tried in earnest to reject them. There was little reason to assume that this sensor would reject the upgrade as well. If she could be optimistic about the outcome of a battle, she could be optimistic about little things as well.

“Alright.” He took a sharp breath, audible even over the faint crackle of static. “When you’re done, head back here. I need you to look at something.”

With that, the commlink went silent. “Wonder what’s got him rattled,” Sabine muttered, mopping her forehead dry of sweat before going back to work. Oh, well; it was no use wondering about that right now. Sabine didn’t pretend to have in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of Kallus’s mind, and she’d find out what the problem was once she got back to base.

Either her optimism had paid off, or this was just one of the better sensors, because the upgrade went off without a hitch, and after just a few moments, Sabine was able to connect this sensor to the others. She’d still need to connect them to the computer back at the base, but the part of the job that required her to be out here was done. Sabine stuffed her tools back into her bag and started to head back towards the base, drinking in her surroundings with curious eyes.

Reamma was a small world deep in the Outer Rim, far from any major trade route or any of the major Imperial strongholds on the Rim. The base, repurposed from an old Separatist listening post from the Clone Wars, was meant to serve as one of many way stations throughout the far reaches of the Outer Rim, on the way to wherever the bulk of the fleet would wind up next. Hera thought they might be setting up shop in the Pantora System soon; word was, Mon Mothma had been making overtures to the Chairman.

Honestly, all the moving around the Rebels had been doing since the Death Star was destroyed was reminding Sabine entirely too much of Phoenix Cell’s stint as nomads between being driven off of Garel and settling on Atollon. Mandalorian philosophy, the branches Sabine had been taught, suggested that there was something noble about a nomadic lifestyle, but Sabine had never agreed. Her heart yearned for permanence in her surroundings—at the very least, for a place she could always return to. The _Ghost_ was the home of her heart, but she hoped the _Ghost_ would be staying here for a while.

And maybe it would. Reamma _was_ small and remote. It was about as backwater as a planet could get, and preliminary surveys indicated it wasn’t rich in any of the natural resources the Empire typically went after. The climate, outside of the poles, was subtropical, warm and wet. The base was nestled in the midst of a dense forest filled with tangled trees, dangling vines, and tall, sprawling bushes. So long as they didn’t start with flamethrowers or orbital bombardment, the Empire wouldn’t have the easiest time getting to them here.

Sabine took a few photos of the overhead branches with her holo-imager. It’d be worth checking against a databank if any of the plant life here was edible, and if so, to which species.

It wasn’t exactly a short walk back to the base; they needed more than a few minutes’ warning if the Empire sent a probe droid or decided to show up in person. As such, the sun, previously hovering about halfway up the eastern horizon, was high in the sky by the time the compound of low, flat-roofed buildings that served as their base came into view. The buildings reminded her a little of the architecture in Capital City on Lothal. Sabine’s pulse quickened a little. It was… It was a weird feeling.

Kallus emerged from the largest building as soon as she came into the unkempt courtyard. The knees of his trousers were coated in dust, and the look on his face when he caught sight of Sabine could only be described as ‘beside himself.’

Well, there was no stalling now, was there? Sabine slid her helmet off her head and raised an eyebrow. “Look, if this is about the central computer for the cannons, Rebel Command sent the code disk for the software patch to Primtara Outpost by mistake. I can’t do anything with it until we get that disk back.”

“It’s not that,” Kallus said quickly. He seemed okay, asides from looking beside himself. What was the problem, then? He tried dusting off his trousers to no avail, his forehead creasing until it looked as though he’d added a decade’s worth of lines to his face. Finally giving up on his trousers, he sighed sharply and started to head back inside, beckoning her to follow. “Just… take a look for yourself.”

Sabine considered telling him that no matter how bad he _thought_ the situation was, it probably wasn’t as bad as he thought it was. Until you experienced giant, hostile creatures actively trying to kill you while you set up a base, you couldn’t claim you were having a truly awful time setting up a base. But she held her tongue. Her understanding of just how Kallus responded to those kinds of comments was… limited at best. She did _try_ to be a professional with people outside of her inner circle, even if her first instinct in this case was to try to one-up him.

And after the krykna and the Death Star, she really wasn’t sure what could be so bad. There was nothing quite like looking up into the sky and seeing _that_ hanging there for putting things into perspective.

Either Kallus hadn’t taken the same lesson from it as she had (and she’d concede that it wasn’t like it was required to take away a ‘lesson’ from the heart-stopping experience of seeing a planet-destroying battle station come into orbit over the planet on which you were currently standing), or he’d taken away something different entirely.

Their destination turned out to be the control center for the base, home to a large number of computers and stations, only around half of them operational. And yeah, half of them being operational meant that half of them didn’t work, but Kallus _knew_ that; he’d been the one to verify which devices were operational in the first place. Sabine eyed the room dubiously as she stepped inside. “So what’s the problem?” she asked, setting her helmet down on a table and scanning her surroundings for signs of anything being obviously out of place.

“This comm unit—“ Kallus strode across the room, slapping his hand down on top of the comm unit’s computer “—was operational last night. The technology is twenty years out of date, but it still worked; I was able to complete a communications test with the _Ghost_ using this station.”

“And now?”

Kallus huffed. “Now, it flickers.” He pressed the monitor activation button; the monitor promptly backed him up, flickering in and out of life, before he finally tapped the button again, and it blinked off for good. “The blasted monitor’s decided to take a day off,” he groused.

He _was_ taking this quite seriously. “You said it yourself,” Sabine pointed out, waving a hand around the room at screens and keyboards coated in layers of dust, most of it yet undisturbed. “This equipment’s old. It also hasn’t been maintained since the last time the Separatists held the planet, and that was a long time ago. And hey,” she added, a thin smile curling around her lips, “just be glad that computer doesn’t have the same kind of personality as Chopper. If it did, it probably would’ve shocked you when you turned the monitor on.”

A joke had seemed like the sort of things that might cut the tension, or at least remind Kallus that this issue was more one of the typical issues that plagued Rebels trying to set up a base, rather than a matter of life and death. It wasn’t quite Sabine’s brand of humor for this kind of situation, felt a little like it should have been coming out of someone else’s mouth, but she’d forced them to fit coming out of hers. And it wasn’t quite the thing to do.

“I don’t care about its personality!” Kallus snapped. He glared down at the computer. “We are flying blind here. Bad enough that we don’t have long-range scanners, but long-range comm being gone too is a disaster waiting to happen. We can’t contact anyone outside of the system for aid, other ships can’t tell if they’re flying into a trap, and we have no means of contacting Rebel Command for—“

“Alright!” Sabine interjected, jerking back a bit. If her eyebrows were any higher, she thought they might have tried to merge with her hairline. So telling a joke had been a mistake. So she’d misjudged the situation and the man both. No use getting caught up in complaints. “Is there anything else about that station you’ve noticed? Any sign of exterior damage?”

Sabine couldn’t be entirely certain, but given the way Kallus hesitated before loudly clearing his throat made her think he might actually be embarrassed. Maybe. It was, the same as it was with a lot of other people, difficult to tell, and frankly, her inability to tell was making her squirm a little. “I went to check under the desk and found damage to the cables. It’s new; the cables were intact when we first arrived.”

Sabine nodded, taking her portable flashlight from her belt. “Okay, I’ll take a look.”

All of the stations in the control center had sliding plimsi doors from the level of the desk down to ground level that shielded the cables and CPUs of the stations from view. Why, Sabine couldn’t imagine. While there was a chance that organics had manned this outpost, she’d lay even odds that most, if not all of the personnel when the base was first built were droids. There wasn’t a whole lot of danger of tripping over cables that were all located under the desks, and from the stories she’d been told, Sabine didn’t get the impression that most Separatist battle droids cared at all about aesthetics. Some of the super tactical droids that went long enough without memory wipes to develop personalities might have, but the rest? No. Just no. By all accounts, the B1s were too stupid to appreciate aesthetics, anyways.

Kneeling to get a better look under the desk immediately left Sabine coughing; there was enough dust under there to build a person. “Well, the power pack we put down looks alright.”

“It’s not that.” Kallus got down on his knees beside her, his eyes watering as he coughed. “Look—“ another sharp, wheezing cough “—at the cables.”

When Sabine shone her light on the cables, she didn’t see the problem, not right away. Like the computers, the cables were old; even when left undisturbed, there was bound to be some wear and tear. But she soon spotted what Kallus had been talking about, and something about the exposed, glittering wires did _not_ look like normal wear and tear.

“I can’t decide if it’s corrosion or heat damage,” Kallus muttered beside her, eyeing the damaged cables unenthusiastically. “It looks very much as if activating the computer after so long fried the cables.” His forehead scrunched up. “We may have similar problems with the other stations.”

“That’s not what this is,” Sabine said absently. She leaned forwards, sneezing a few times before she was able to take a closer look at the cables. She held one of the ends in her hand, her fingers curling around the protective casing. “It looks more like something’s been chewing on them. And I’ll bet there’s more.”

An inspection of one of the stations that hadn’t been working when the _Ghost_ arrived on Reamma yielded similar results. Many of the cables had been chewed through, teeth marks visible on the intact portions of cable and scraps of black protective casing nestled in the dust. Checking a couple more got the same result as well.

“Hey, Kallus?” Sabine said, as they looked over the underbelly of another station. “The only base you were ever stationed at was Yavin, right? And you didn’t do a lot of traveling when you were stationed there, right?”

“That would be correct.” Kallus ducked his head so that he could half-crawl under the desk. To Sabine’s shock, he actually started to crawl under the desk, apparently to get a close-up look at the damaged cables. “Rebel Command was starting the process of coordinating between different Fulcrum agents. I assisted in that process.” There came a sharp thud and Kallus abruptly crawled back out, rubbing the back of his head and wincing. “I had other duties, of course, but that was an ongoing assignment.” He scowled. “Though that assignment has since been abandoned.”

Sabine felt a stab of pity, almost in spite of herself. They’d had so many long-term assignments and projects and missions, so many ambitions for infrastructure and attacks and so many other things. All it took was one slip-up, one probe droid in the wrong place to throw all of those plans into chaos. The Death Star was many orders of magnitude larger than a probe droid, but just as annoying when you found yourself having to start over. “Yeah. Well, stuff like this? This is pretty normal when you’re setting up a base.” She squinted at him. “It’s not unusual for buildings we’re trying to set up in to just be completely wrecked. Things can get wrecked pretty fast when we’re building from scratch, too.”

“I know that,” Kallus retorted, but without any real heat. “Believe it or not, the Empire has similar troubles; I am well-acquainted with them. But the state of affairs here leaves us vulnerable to attack.” He raked his hand through his hair and sighed heavily, his nostrils flaring. “If I am going to die, I would rather die in a way that I can still be of use, not because a light cruiser has come to investigate and I don’t know they’re firing on us until the first shot hits the compound.”

Truly, that kind of death was hardly the stuff of legends. It was the kind of death Sabine could remember listening to her mother sneer about when she was a small child. She winced and nodded. “It’s not the way I’d like to go out.”

Kallus laughed suddenly, though his voice was tinged with a faint, wry bitterness. “But with the way this looks, I almost wonder if we’re dealing with gremlins.”

“Gremlins?” Sabine tilted her head. Well, here was about the last person she’d ever expected to talk about gremlins… talking about gremlins. And doing it _wrong_ , too. “Those little things from kid’s stories that crawl into blasters and make them malfunction?”

Another laugh hit the air, sharper, almost barking. “The only gremlins I know of are the ones that live on star destroyers and disconnect everything they can get their grubby little hands on, so nothing works the way it ought to. It really shouldn’t have surprised me that Rebel bases would be infested with them, too. Some things are just universal constants.”

Curious almost in spite of herself, Sabine was about to remark that what he had described sounded more like a kasfeld than a gremlin, when a loud, metallic thud broke the silence of the room. As one, they turned to look at the circular cluster of computers in the center of the room, both frowning.

“Were those computers working when we got here?”

“…Yes,” and if Kallus sounded like the absolute _last_ thing he wanted was to look under the table and find the cables in anything other than pristine working condition, Sabine chose not to notice. She wasn’t sure what to do with that right now.

Any talk about cultural differences regarding gremlins was going to have to wait.

They made their way to the cluster of computers in the center of the room, as another metallic clang rang out. _Something_ under there was metal; maybe a fan had just stopped working properly. Somehow, that didn’t seem likely—another thud rang out, and it did not sound like the noise a fan made when it was malfunctioning, not at all; it sounded a lot more like the simplest explanation for something to be banging like that—but she was trying to be optimistic here. It wouldn’t kill her to be optimistic every now and then; for Sabine, part of growing up had entailed finally admitting to herself that being pessimistic all the time was exhausting. Optimism, however, wasn’t going to play nice today. Optimism wasn’t willing to tell her that that was the sound of a fan malfunctioning, not when her brain was processing the auditory input in a very different way.

Sabine knelt down under the lip of the table and slid the plimsi door back, flicking her flashlight on and peering into the darkness, face creased in a squint and ever-deepening frown. No, it definitely wasn’t the fans, but there was something…

“Do you see anything?” Kallus muttered close behind her.

Sabine kept herself from jumping and hitting her head on the underside of the table, but it was a close thing. “No,” she said shortly, and wished for a moment that it was one of the others who had been left on the base with her. “Back up; I can’t see anything with you blocking the light.”

“Then tell me what you see,” he said just as shortly, but complied.

_Okay, what’s the problem here…_

_…What the hell?_

Sabine edged back from under the table and caught Kallus’s eye. “Look!” she hissed, pointing through the doorway.

Once positioned so he could see under the table, Kallus echoed her own thoughts. “What is _that_ supposed to be?” he muttered to himself, face twisting in confusion.

The swell of fellow-feeling that rose in Sabine was more intense than she would have expected, and she tamped it down, edging uneasily around the borders of her own surprise. Just another weird development in what was suddenly shaping up to be a very weird day.

They had reached a point where, Sabine thought, the best way to describe their relationship was that their relationship was amicably neutral. They didn’t have a whole lot to talk about, she and formerly-Agent, currently-Captain Kallus. She hadn’t disliked him for a long time; the days of trying to shoot him or punch his lights out were long past. They weren’t enemies anymore, and they didn’t really dislike each other anymore, but they just didn’t have much reason to interact with each other, most of the time. There had been no effort on either of their parts to bridge the gap.

They didn’t talk to each other much. If they were stationed on the same base, their duties typically took them to different parts of the base, and Sabine didn’t think they’d ever had the same watch shift when they were both on guard duty. For all that the _Ghost_ wasn’t a large ship, they’d never had the occasion to speak privately there. Sabine had by necessity become a master of finding privacy in close quarters long ago. Kallus seemed to still be learning that trick himself; hence, their paths rarely crossed unless something was wrong. Heck, they’d never even done joint babysitting duty with Jacen.

They didn’t talk to each other much, and even if the days of formerly-Agent Kallus trying to capture the _Ghost_ were long past, Sabine still _remembered_ them. So naturally, interacting with him for longer than about ten second was a bit weird.

But not as weird as this.

If the computers in the central cluster had been in working order yesterday, Sabine could only suppose that there hadn’t been any damage to the cables yesterday. Yesterday. As for today, today was a different story.

Just as with the others she’d examined, the cables under the central cluster were in many places in tatters, dangling uselessly, while bits of severed wire glittered like banks of stars in the darkness. Same as the others, these looked like they’d been chewed on, but there was a critical difference. Whatever had been chewing on the wires hadn’t stopped at chewing on them, here.

“It looks like something’s been building a nest,” Sabine muttered, angling her flashlight to get a better look. The “nest” (if that was what this was) was about a foot in diameter, and was made up of broken wire and cable, dead leaves and scraps of cloth and other trash—Sabine even caught sight of what she was pretty sure was the material for a plimsi storage cube. “But what is it?” She flicked her flashlight up, scanning, the dark, but all she saw were thick knots of cables in varying states of injury.

Then there came another thud. Not metallic this time, but duller, as if it was being made by slamming up against plimsi.

Sabine slid the door shut again and stood. Kallus seemed to guess at her purpose; “The sound came from over there,” he said quietly, and beat a swift track to the other side of the cluster. As if in answer, there came another thud, making one of the sliding doors rattle.

They knelt down by the door in question, Sabine curling her hand over the rectangular handle. She strained her ears for any other kind of sound, anything that could give her a hint of what they were dealing with, beside it being small and (probably) having sharp teeth. A few seconds, and there was nothing.

 _Okay,_ fine. _Seeing is believing_.

Sabine yanked the door open.

Seeing was believing, but she didn’t get much of a chance.

Faster than she could react, two small animals burst out from under the table. She tried to grab one of them, to no avail. They tore off, screeching as they skittered away, soon vanishing from sight and hearing both. The last sight Sabine had of them were large, dark, fluffy tails disappearing through the open doorway.

“Huh,” she said, and managed to imbue the one syllable with a hundred words’ worth of embarrassment through means she would have rather left up to the imagination—and the embarrassment itself immured in the heart of a star, preferably a supergiant about to collapse into a black hole. At least there’d only been one witness to her being outsmarted by a pair of rodents. At least that witness didn’t record everything so he could laugh at the stupidity of meatbags like a certain droid Sabine knew.

“There’s your gremlins.” There. That was a better follow-up.

Kallus had been staring blankly out the door, but Sabine’s words seemed to draw him back to himself. “Not gremlins.” He slammed his fist on the ground. “Rats. We must have picked them up the last time we docked at a space station; blast it, where do they keep _coming_ from?”

“Yeah, those weren’t rats; looked more like some kind of ground squirrel.” She quirked an eyebrow. “And what do you mean, ‘ _keep_ coming from?’ We’ve never had any problems with infestation. If anything like that tries to get onboard the _Ghost_. Chopper zaps ‘em before they can get a foothold.”

“I was speaking of star destroyers.” And the reluctance that made him draw the words out gave Sabine the impression he’d rather not be speaking of it at all. “It’s much more difficult to control infestations effectively on such a large ship, especially when personnel don’t check over the shuttles as they ought to after a visit to the spaceport.” Kallus rolled his eyes wearily. “Three or four vermin successfully infiltrate the ship, and the next thing you know, you’re fishing dead vermin out of the caf maker in the officer’s lounge on C Deck and they’ve chewed through the wires for the long range comm, so you can’t call for help if you’re attacked.”

Sabine stared at him, open-mouthed. “Suddenly, I… have _so_ many questions.”

And Kallus looked even more as though he regretted ever bringing it up. “Later. There’s only so much embarrassment I can weather in a single day. Besides—“ he waved his hand towards the doorway “—we still need to catch them, don’t we?”

“What makes you think they’ll stay? Animals like that don’t usually like trying to live in the same space as sentients; they probably only came in here because they thought they’d have the place to themselves.” But even as she said the words, another strain of thought was trying its best to give the lie to those same words. Those squirrels had chewed through the cables in the central cluster _after_ the power had been turned back on. It stood to reason, then, that they had at least some resistance to electricity. Resistance to electricity on this tiny world, where the only settlement was the one she was standing in right now, and there weren’t any electricity-harboring plants, predatory animals with electrical organs, or anything like that. It didn’t necessarily _have_ to mean the squirrels would stay here instead of seeking greener pastures, but optimism currently had one foot out of a fifth story window.

“If they were willing to make a nest here,” Kallus argued, “I don’t think they’ll leave unless removed. So yes, lieutenant commander, I do think they’ll stay.”

“Okay, _captain_. Where do you think they’re going to go?”

He frowned in silence for a long moment, but soon seemed to think of something—and judging from the way his face turned a pale, nasty white, the moment of discovery had _not_ been pleasant. “We installed the bacta tanks yesterday,” he said faintly.

Sabine’s stomach swooped unpleasantly. “Damn it!” She sprang to her feet. “Come on!”

It took entirely too long for Sabine’s liking for them to reach the fledgling infirmary, the corridors seeming to stretch on for miles. Hera’s voice rang in her mind, reminding her that it was important that the infirmary and the control center not be close to one another, so that shots meant to destroy the control center would be at least a little less likely to kill the wounded in the infirmary, so that ground forces couldn’t take over both locations in one fell swoop. Pity they hadn’t taken vermin into account when making these decisions.

Upon reaching the infirmary, Sabine strode over to the two bacta tanks near the back of the room. As yet, the tanks were empty—the bacta was scheduled to arrive via freighter in a week or so. But the cables and wires connecting the tanks to their power source were very much present, and very much vulnerable to sharp, tenacious teeth. Bacta tanks were the pride and joy of every Rebel infirmary and med bay lucky enough to have them, and entirely too difficult to replace if damaged.

“How’s that one looking?” she asked Kallus tersely as she closely examined the wiring of one of the tanks. There wasn’t any damage visible on this one’s wires, but that didn’t mean the other was in the clear.

 _Rebel Command isn’t going to send us new tanks if something happens to these two. We could grow our own bacta if we had to_ —though the idea of doing so made visions of bad strains of bacta that made people grow rudimentary limbs on their chests dance through Sabine’s mind— _but we’d have to pick up new tanks somewhere else. Pay a fortune for stolen, or steal them ourselves._

They’d had tougher jobs than stealing bacta tanks, true. But they’d be dealing with people who’d sooner shoot the tanks than let the Rebels have one, since they could always make _more_. This was what—or at least part of what; it certainly wasn’t the _whole_ —made the Empire so vile. When you’ve got thousands of feet, what’s the problem with shooting _one_? What’s the problem with swallowing one world when you’ve got tens of thousands more?

“No damage,” Kallus replied.

Sabine let out a sigh of relief. “Okay. They probably haven’t come through here yet. They probably won’t be chewing on anything for a while,” she admitted to herself. “Probably looking for somewhere to hide. So how do we get rid of them?”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Wren; we need to flush them out fast. Though, as for getting rid of the vermin—“ Kallus gazed darkly at the bacta tanks’ wiring “—shooting them should do the trick.”

“Are you _serious_?!” Sabine exclaimed, jerking her head back.

“ _Yes_ ,” Kallus retorted, jaw set, though his voice grew steadily more high-pitched with every word that followed. Almost squeaky. “If we let them stay, they’ll ruin the wiring in the base. If we relocate them, there’s every change they’ll just come back. What else are we to do?”

“Then who’s going to shoot them?” Sabine challenged, glaring up at him. “’Cause me? I don’t like using small animals for target practice. How about you?”

Kallus paused, blinking rapidly. “Not…” His face took on a slightly greenish cast. “…Not especially. But the equipment they’ve damaged will take time to repair or replace, and until then, we’ve been crippled by a pair of _squirrels_.” He drew a deep breath. “I don’t see that we have too many options here.”

“Let’s stop for a minute and _think_ of something, then?”

To Sabine’s shock, he actually did as suggested and fell silent. Sabine went to an overturned crate and sat down, racking her brains for anything she could use.

Shooting the squirrels was right out. Sabine liked target practice, and she liked practicing with moving targets, but the idea of _live_ targets for target practice made her a little queasy; it always had. No amount of taunting from older cousins—or, later, classmates; at least Tristan and Ketsu had never tried to push her—could change her opinion. Those older cousins and classmates had always been a little more eager to shed blood than was trustworthy, anyways, even by Mandalorian standards. You were supposed to only exercise that kind of bloodlust on something that was actually _important_ , not everyday stuff.

A stun blast might work, but Sabine would, for one, have to get a clear shot, and for another, have to be certain that the stun setting of her blaster wouldn’t be enough to kill the squirrels. She couldn’t be certain of either. Killing a small animal on purpose for reasons other than self-defense or needing the meat made her queasy. Doing the same thing by accident was just embarrassing.

Sabine pursed her lips. She _had_ off-loaded some canisters of knock-out gas from the _Ghost_ ; if the squirrels were mammalian, then the gas _should_ work on them. Distribution would be a problem, though. Without the canisters being hooked up to some sort of distribution system, she’d be relying on spraying them manually. If the squirrels got more than a couple of feet away from her and her can before she could gas them, all that would happen would be that Sabine would be left holding the can and feeling very, very foolish.

“Hmm.” Sabine looked up from her ponderings to see Kallus inspecting one of the bacta tanks, eyes narrowed. “These bacta tanks are of a very high quality.”

Sabine’s mouth twitched. “The Empire’s bacta may be cheap gunk, but everybody knows their tanks are the best around.”

Kallus’s eyebrows shot up, his eyes flashing with surprise. “These are Imperial tanks?”

“Yeah, they’re Imperial. Don’t they still have the cog?”

“No, no cog.” Kallus frowned at the tanks. He didn’t look angry, not exactly, but there was a sort of amorphous, shifting disquiet swirling beneath his skin. “You know…” His voice had the haze of reminiscence, dipping deep down into the soup of memory. “…There have been rashes of thefts of bacta tanks all along the Rim for years. At the start, it was assumed that the Rebels were stealing them to sell on the black market; it wasn’t until later that anyone supposed the Rebels might be keeping them for their own use.” That ‘later,’ Sabine surmised, was around the time the Empire was finally forced to admit to itself that there was more to the Rebellion than a few scattered pockets of resistance isolated from each other. “The last theft I investigated came about six years ago; we never did find out who was responsible.”

‘Six years ago’ rang a bell, actually. “Lunar outpost about halfway between Lothal and Garel?” Sabine probed, eyes narrowed. When he nodded, she went on, “Yeah, that was us.”

“That was _you_?!” Kallus exclaimed, jaw working furiously with disbelief.

“That was us, yeah.”

“We never got a read on the ship that attacked the outpost.” He sounded almost suspicious, and Sabine wondered just how easy it was to wind him up. Those first few months he’d spent on Yavin, if there had been anyone willing to approach him… Well, Sabine wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people with jokesters’ temperaments assessed an uptight former ISB agent as being fun to wind up. It kind of made her wish she’d been there those first few months. Kind of.

In the present, she smirked at him. “The _Ghost_ can scramble its signature, remember?”

Apparently, he had _not_ remembered, because Kallus blinked in silence for a few moments before grimacing. “Yes, I suppose that would come in handy.”

“This was right after you first showed up. We could still fly under the radar with just that trick.”

What was much more significant, Sabine felt, was that it was just after Ezra had joined the crew. She didn’t say so. Saying so would be too much like saying how much more easily their current problem could have been solved if Ezra was here. She didn’t want…

She just didn’t want to get into that right now.

If Kallus was aware of the sudden disorder jumbling Sabine’s thoughts, he gave no sign of it. “When we have the time, I would like to know how you did it.”

Now, it was Sabine’s turn again to stare in disbelief. “Seriously?”

At least he seemed to understand why that might be a weird question. “Yes, seriously.” He hunched his shoulders, before realizing what he was doing and smoothing them out again. “The theft was masterfully done; we never could discern who carried it out, even with reports of the _Ghost’s_ activities in the area. At the time, I—“ he raised an eyebrow, an old shadow darkening his face “—had many questions. I wouldn’t mind having some of them answered.”

“What, so you can look back on your own incompetence?” It was meant partly as a joke, but only partly, and Sabine’s voice was all the sharper for it.

“Not _my_ incompetence,” Kallus said stiffly. “After that theft, _I_ had made the recommendation that we…” He fell silent, his face growing slightly pale, and said no more.

He didn’t need to say anything more. Sabine could guess at the general shape of that unfinished sentence, like a knife scraping the side of her ribs.

_‘I, my former self who is too close to my current self for my own comfort and, sometimes, everyone else’s.’_

Oh, no, it was not comfortable. There was something sharp and ponderous burning on Sabine’s tongue, and it was all the words she could have used to try to cut him to the quick. She swallowed them back down, but was entirely too conscious of the hot ember lodged in her throat, making her gut twist.

Rebel Command’s policy was to, as much as possible, let bygone be bygones. Fully half of the lower ranks of the Rebellion were Imperial defectors, and that number only grew the higher up the ranks you looked. Hera was one of only a handful of generals who wasn’t a defector, and as for the leadership… Well, Sabine thought there _might_ be one or two military officials who had never served the Empire, but she honestly couldn’t name them. Even Leia and Mon Mothma qualified as Imperial defectors.

Still, the rule, unspoken though it might have been, was that unless your past as an Imperial was relevant to Rebellion business, you did not talk about it. You didn’t talk about it. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ was fine in theory, but it tended to fall apart faster than the speed of light when you, say, found out that the person sitting across from you in the mess hall participated in the massacre of your home colony. Sabine had watched plenty of brawls break out that way. She’d broken up more than a few of those, and it was hard to… It was hard.

You didn’t talk about it, especially not when the people around you were unlikely to be fond of what you used to be.

Kallus was one of those.

 _I’m another_.

 _It’s not the same_ , Sabine argued with herself. _It’s not the same_. It wasn’t the same, was it? But it was too similar. Date of defection and rationale for defection differed. Depth of involvement with the Empire differed. The makeup of the deeds that damned them was different. But history would look upon them with the same at best ambivalent eye. Alexsandr Kallus, participant in the Lasan genocide. Sabine Wren, architect of a weapon of mass destruction used to enslave her people.

 _It’s not the same_.

Something else was germinating at the back of Sabine’s mind, too deeply-rooted to be yanked out, too sharp to ever rest comfortably against the walls of her mind. All those years she never spoke of what she had done, it said, she hasn’t been atoning. She had just been hiding.

“So, what did you say?” Her voice wasn’t supposed to sound this weak. It was because she was trying something new, Sabine supposed. That was the only thing she could figure. The only thing at all.

“I recommended…” He paused, and Sabine knew without needing to be told that its origins were somewhere other than a sudden lapse in memory. “…That bacta tanks in facilities on the Rim be fitted with tracking devices that could not be removed or disabled without rendering the tanks themselves useless.”

Sabine nodded stiffly. “I guess that makes sense.” If you were working for an organization that had no problem shooting itself in the foot, since it had thousands more, it made sense. “They didn’t go for it, though, did they?”

“No, they didn’t.” At least he didn’t sound annoyed. At least he seemed to remember exactly where he was. “In retrospect, I have a few ideas as to why.” And Sabine had one very _large_ idea as to why. “But we’ve gotten off-topic. Do you have any idea what we’re to do about these squirrels?”

Sabine shook her head choppily. “No. We’re short on supplies here, and it’s not like anyone expected us to hunt for our food, so we haven’t got any hunting gear we could trap them with.”

“Do you have any knock-out gas?”

“Yeah, plenty, but unless we can catch them and hold them in place, they’ll get away from me before I can spray them.”

Kallus crossed his arms around his chest, the index finger of his left hand drumming a steady tattoo on his right arm. He chewed on his lip, silent, until finally he said, simply, “The air filtration system.”

Confusedly, “What air filtration system?”

“The base should have one.”

“Kallus, why would this place have an air filtration system? The base was manned by _droids_ ; they don’t need clean air to work in.”

“It was in case of an attack. Now, come on.”

Though skeptical, Sabine followed after him, stopping on the way by her quarters to pick up a few canisters of knock-out gas. Eventually, they stopped at the end of a hallway, where all there was to be found were some empty plastic crates and an access panel close to the ceiling.

“Air filtration systems,” Kallus said, waving to the access panel and sounding almost absurdly pleased with himself.

Sabine eyed it doubtfully. “Seriously?”

“ _Yes,_ seriously. Now, let’s take a look…”

Thankfully, the ceiling wasn’t so high that they had to stand on more than one crate to reach the access panel. Actually, the ceiling was so low in this part of the compound that, when he stood on the crate, Kallus cracked his head on the ceiling and spent the better part of a minute afterwards rubbing the back of his head and swearing under his breath. Sabine snorted, but the incident lost its humor when she thought of the trouble Zeb was going to have navigating this part of the compound.

The panel gave way without needed to apply hardly any force at all. Behind it there was a cluster of (mercifully undamaged) wires, a large, empty port, and a small computer screen with ports for spikes and code cylinders. Sabine blinked. “Huh. Air filtration system.”

“As I said.” Kallus tried and failed not to sound a little smug. He reached in and examined the large port, eventually pulling out a thick, rubber tube. “These were put in place in case of Republic invasion; the system would release a fast-acting nerve gas designed to penetrate clone troopers’ helmets and kill them before they could do much damage. If I remember correctly, it was a late development in the clone wars; it looks like the canisters of nerve gas were removed from this base, or were never installed in the first place.”

Canisters of nerve gas, if they hadn’t gone inert after at least two decades of no use, would have been a useful addition to their arsenal, though Sabine suspected she would have had a hard time getting Hera to agree with her. Oh, well; this was useful, too. She tilted her head to one side, peering closely at him. “Not that I’m complaining, but how did you know about this? It wasn’t in the briefing or the schematics.”

He shrugged. “In the Royal Academy on Coruscant, any student undergoing officer’s training is required to complete an extensive course on military history.” A momentary pause, then a frown. “You weren’t?”

It was easy enough to push down the disquiet provoked by his knowing she’d been a cadet—he’d probably found that out in the aftermath of the Skystrike incident. But still, Sabine couldn’t quite effect an even tone as she replied, “The Sundari Academy’s curriculum is focused more on _Mandalorian_ history. And I wasn’t in officer’s training.” Her stomach churned. “Not exactly.”

The tech was simple, easy enough to navigate and hack; it would have _had_ to be easy to navigate, given how dumb the average Separatist combat droid was reputed to be. They went around the base, plugging Sabine’s canisters of knock-out gas into every access panel they could find.

“Do you suppose Captain Rex would mind if I borrowed one of his helmets? I don’t want to be affected by the gas.”

“He’ll be fine with it. Just don’t scuff the paint. That’s one of my paint jobs.”

“…I don’t think that will be a problem.”

After that, they set themselves to scouring the base for the squirrels. Her helmet retrieved, Sabine could at least listen out better for the chattering of small mammals. They eventually found them, huddled at the back of a dark store room behind a bunch of damaged crates and other trash.

Given the way they responded to the gas, it turned out they were mammalian.

“Here, put them in this crate; the one with the holes on the sides.” Sabine pried what she suspected was a female squirrel from the debris, not even bothering to resist the urge to raise an eyebrow at the sight of its distended belly. And getting a closer look at said squirrel, yeah, almost certainly mammalian. Good grief. “Looks like they’re a mated pair; they were probably looking for somewhere they could make a nice, safe nest.”

“Lovely.” Kallus’s voice was muffled, his face hidden behind the helmet, but Sabine could practically _hear_ him rolling his eyes. “I’m sure amniotic fluid would have done wonders for our computers’ functionality. What are we going to do with them now?”

Sabine nodded decisively. “Right. I’m going to check the database and see if I can’t figure out where these squirrels are native to. If they’re native to here, we wait ‘til the _Ghost_ comes back and then drop them off far, _far_ away from here. If your first guess was right and they snuck onto the _Ghost_ while we were somewhere else, we’ll try to get them back home. It seems like the least we can do.”

About twenty minutes later found the two of them sitting on the stoop outside, with the squirrels hissing drowsily in their crate and Sabine flipping through a datapad, trying to get a visual match on the ‘captives.’ The sun was starting to go down over the horizon, staining the sky yellow and spawning long shadows that stretched across the ground towards her, but the cloying heat still pressed on her shoulders, like it just wanted to lay her out on the ground and bury her.

“I hope the _Ghost_ doesn’t try to contact the base over long-range comm while they’re doing reconnaissance,” Kallus muttered, heaving a sigh as he stared off at the sky. He sat ramrod straight, shoulders stiff.

“If they do, they’ll come right back,” Sabine countered absently, “so we won’t have long to wait. And they’re due back in a couple of hours, anyways.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, frowning pensively. “Hey…”

“Yes?”

“I… haven’t ever said it.” And it still felt clumsy on her mouth, but it bore saying. “But I’m glad I didn’t shoot you in the face back at Skystrike.”

He snorted. “Likewise.”

“And… And I’m glad you made it off the _Chimaera_ in one piece,” Sabine said quietly, her frown deepening.

She’d never said it. But they hadn’t been enemies for a while, and if there was any time to say it, now was as good as any.

Kallus stared at her, visibly thrown. “…Thank you,” he said at last, just as quietly.

They sat in silence, waiting for the _Ghost_ to return.


End file.
